covering the mouse

Thursday, March 6, 2008

Trust In Me - Belly

Brian Ibbott visiting again from Coverville. Kurtis was nice enough to invite me to guest post during Villains Week (heyyyyy, wait a minute...), and even before I knew the theme for the week, I had my song picked out.

Today's song originally comes from the 1967 animated adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. Speaking personally, it's hard to think of any of the villains of Jungle Book as villains. You look at Cruella De Vil? She chose to be evil. How about Jafar? Again, voluntarily wicked. But the antagonists in Jungle Book were really just being their animal-instinct selves. Shere Khan is a tiger, for pete's sake. What's he going to do? Suddenly become a vegetarian? King Louie is just satisfying the curiosity of his baboon-like obsession with fire. And then there's Kaa. Kaa the boa constrictor, who captures Mowgli and hypnotizes him to the strains of Trust In Me, a slithery slink of a song, with the hopes of dining on him. Snakelike behavior? Okay, maybe not the hypnotism, but you get the picture.

Siouxie and the Banshees' version of Trust In Me may be more well known, but the cover by BELLY should not be discounted. On my cover song-based podcast, Coverville, I featured the lineage of the band Belly in episode 352. Stepsisters Kristin Hersh and Tanya Donnelly formed Throwing Muses in the early 1980's. In 1990, Donnelly started working with the Pixies' Kim Deal in a band called The Breeders, and shortly afterwards, left the Muses. And as if she weren't busy enough, Donnelly formed a new band, Belly, that same year. Belly's biggest hit came in 1991, a confusing track called Feed The Tree. And staying together (through a couple lineup changes) through 1996, Tree remained their biggest hit.

Appearing on the Japanese exclusive BABY SILVERTOOTH in 1993 and their 2002 BEST OF compilation, Belly's take on Trust In Me is less sinister without Siouxie's vocals, but Tanya's octave-higher performance makes the song more hypnotic. In fact, listening to it now, I...